Studying Science and Social Inequalities: Resurgences and Divergences

Abstract

Spontaneous Generations deserves credit for calling attention to the histories and futures of scholarship that critically investigates the science/technology/inequality nexus. My own suggestion in this regard is modest: Rather than assuming that there is any single or obvious way in which scientific knowledge and technologies, on the one hand, and social inequalities, on the other, might be related (causally or otherwise), we ought to embrace complexity by considering some of the different sorts of things that the phrase “science and social inequality” might connote. However, I should signal from the outset that I won’t be taking for granted that the “reproduction” of inequality—that is, how “science and technology reflect and create social inequalities,” to quote from the opening sentence of the call for papers for this special issue—is the only relevant mode of activity that we ought to examine. Instead I will assume it to be helpful to consider how scientific knowledge and technological systems might be related to reproducing, reinforcing, chal lenging, transforming, or eliminating inequalities. As an (admittedly inadequate) gesture at the kind of complexity I hope to signal, I will take up just three of many possible points of linkage between technoscience and the reproduction of, reinforcement of, challenge to, transformation of, or elimination of inequalities. These are: the causes and consequences of unequal access to participation in knowledge-making; scientific practices of difference-making and their consequences for social categories, identities, and hierarchies; and the scientization of everyday concepts and its implications for inequalities. The first case, that of unequal access to participation in knowledge-making, relates to a growth area in STS, where scholars